To hear President Donald Trump and his allies tell it, the federal investigators who spent the past two years investigating the president are about to go down.
On Twitter, on conservative cable TV and in countless interviews, they’ve claimed the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are on the verge of being exposed for planting spies, falsifying evidence and forging testimony. They’ve relished in the possibility that a federal prosecutor on the case could file criminal charges. And they’ve predicted jail time for top Obama-era leaders who they say were behind a “deep state” plot to take down Trump.
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They’re expecting all of this to come from a spate of Justice Department probes reviewing the full scope of the Trump-Russia investigation, which culminated earlier this year with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
“This was treason. This was high crimes,” Trump said during a recent Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. “This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with. This should never be allowed to happen to our country again.”
These hyperbolic expectations have legal experts, even some who are often sympathetic to the president, skeptical that the final product can equal the Trump-fueled rhetoric.
“What I think is going to happen is nobody is going to be charged with any criminal activity,” said Jon Sale, a former assistant U.S. attorney from Miami and longtime friend of Rudy Giuliani, a personal attorney to the president.
Source: Trump fuels outsize expectations that Russia investigators will face prison time
